Boxee Review

Overview

Boxee can help you connect to the Internet and find those movies and TV shows you want to watch. Boxee TV partners with Netflix, Vudu Movies and Pandora Internet Radio to offer you a wide selection of movies, TV and radio from the web. Once you start to use Boxee you will not need to subscribe to cable TV because everything you need to watch on your TV will be available from the Internet at no further cost.

Boxee can therefore let you save hundreds of pounds a year on you cable TV subscriptions while giving you a very wide selection of entertainment that you can see by hooking up to Boxee. There are thousands of TV shows you can access from the web and with the help of Netflix and Vudu Movies you can also view a wide assortment of movies. Video, music and photo offerings are available from the library of apps made available to you by Boxee. In addition to all this Boxee LiveTV can offer news, sport and special events from local broadcast stations.

You can use any browser to send movies, TV shows and videos from the Internet to your Boxee for viewing at a later time. This means that you can plan your viewing in advance just as easily as you could when you subscribed to cable TV, but with Boxee you can do this at a fraction of the cost. While using Boxee you can still connect to Facebook and Twitter to exchange views with your friends and see their recommendations on what to watch. Your personal videos, photos and music can be shown on your TV using Boxee.

The sleek black box in your living room will be the envy of your friends. You can connect Boxee to your TV using the HDMI cord that is provided with the box and this allows you to watch all your favorite movies and TV shows on the flat screen TV. You can use the two-sided remote control from anywhere in the house to control what you are watching using Boxee.

What We Liked

A very wide range of TV shows and movies is available from the Internet;

It is no longer necessary to subscribe to cable TV;

You can select TV shows and movies from the Internet to watch later.

What We Didn’t Like

Although there is a wide selection of TV shows not everything is available from the Internet.

What Services Are Available?

You have access to services such as Netflix, Pandora, Spotify and Vudu Movies.

Thanks for the question Rob! With Boxee you do still have to pay to access content from subscription services such as Netflix or Hulu Plus, but any content you can get online for free you should be able to get on your Boxee for free. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work out that way since Hulu (the free version) won’t work with Boxee and even the network TV websites have issues with the quality of playback when they work. On the other hand, it does seem to work well with some sites such as Comedy Central so watching The Daily Show or Colbert Report shouldn’t be a problem. If there’s something available for free online that you really want to watch on your Boxee, I’d recommend googling “Boxee + [whatever the show or site that you want to watch]” to make sure it’s available before buying the device–there’s an active Boxee support forum too, so if you can’t find it in your google search then you could always ask there. To repeat the direct answer to your question though, no, you can’t watch content from subscription services such as Netflix on Boxee without paying for the subscription (this goes for all the other hardware devices that let you access content online too). Hooking up your laptop to your TV is probably the hardware that offers access to the most free content online.